Wednesday Morning Rant

On Monday, Ace posted about the "shocking" failure of Comey and the IC in the Clinton E-Mail scandal. It turns out, as everyone with a brain had already guessed, that they didn't bother to look into it at all. They just claimed they did, and the press went along with it and asked no questions. That is the press' part to play, and it played its part as well as it always does.

At the end of that post, Ace quoted a tweet about the press in a different context, which is about Tapper's book. That tweet reads, in part:

The main takeaway from Original Sin is that CNN doesn't do reporting/investigating. Tapper admits that everything they said about Biden's mental and physical health was based solely on what the White House said.

It was nearly a decade ago that the White House publicly boasted about this, well before Biden was even a gleam in the Party's eye as a controllable, compromise candidate to wade into the vacuum left by the various Democrat factions all seeing their preferred candidates collapse early in the 2020 campaign. This isn't some new reality, and it has nothing to do with Biden. Biden was a beneficiary of prior work and neither he nor his people built the environment that made this possible.

Though he, too, stood on the shoulders of giants, the total credulity of the press - total to the point that it doesn't even know how to be anything else - is the product of Barack Obama and his administration. Specifically, it is the product of Ben Rhodes, who worked manfully for years to create exactly the environment that Tapper is now decrying and at which everyone is, laughably, claiming some sort of surprise. Rhodes was astonishingly clear about it when he spoke to the New York Times for its fawning special article about him in 2016.

He is the master shaper and retailer of Obama's foreign-policy narratives, at a time when the killer wave of social media has washed away the sand castles of the traditional press. His ability to navigate and shape this new environment makes him a more effective and powerful extension of the president's will than any number of policy advisers or diplomats or spies.

"We created an echo chamber," he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. "They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say."

When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America's future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. "In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this," he said. "We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked."

Why? This is not a surprise. It wasn't a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, and it can't have been a surprise to those in the press blindly reporting whatever the White House told them to report. It's all they know how to do. Obama, Rhodes and various others built - and boasted about - the "echo chamber" that replaced what was left of the dreg-infested newsrooms across the country. Anyone in the press or anything even approaching a wonkish position who now claims surprise that the press credulously published everything they were told to publish and asked no questions deserves nothing but disbelief and derision.

They knew because they had to have known. It was nearly a decade ago that those who helped design the modern Press echo chamber went to that same echo chamber to boast about it. This is how the press works, and the only way it knows how to work. The American press was never any good, but it's now also hopelessly incompetent. It asks no questions not only because it doesn't want to, but because it doesn't even know how any more. It is an echo chamber filled with automata, and nothing more. It can be nothing else.

With the Biden dementia story, along with everything else before, during and after his illegitimate administration, the Press is operating precisely according to its design - and nobody can credibly claim surprise about it. It is working as its designers built it to work, before they took their victory laps in the New York Times Magazine.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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